Edward Aveling

From Philosopedia

Aveling, Edward Bibbins (29 November 1849 - 2 August 1898)

An English freethought teacher, Aveling, according to Gordon Stein,

• was one of the very few people associated with the freethought movement in the past two hundred years about whom the balance of opinion is negative. Aveling’s weaknesses were women, toward whom he was thoroughly unprincipled, and money, which he had a fine knack of spending, especially when it was borrowed.

George Bernard Shaw once described him:

• If it came to giving one’s life for a cause one could rely on Aveling even if he carried all our purses with him to the scaffold.

In 1880 Aveling had delivered over a hundred freethought lectures and was made a National Secular Society vice-president. But Bradlaugh lent him money, which was not repaid, and Aveling although he had taken over George William Foote’s publications during his imprisonment and Joseph Mazzinni Wheeler’s illness lost the respect of his fellow freethinkers.

Shaw implied that Aveling not only appropriated a microscope belonging to Mary Reed, one of the most promising pupils in the freethinkers’ Science School, but probably seduced her as well. Aveling was willed money by Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl Marx. He had agreed to marry her when his former marriage could be dissolved. Instead, he married Eva Frye, a twenty-two-year old actress. Eleanor, in a duplication of the suicide of Emmy in Madame Bovary, drank prussic acid, which she had obtained by sending her maid to a chemist with “Dr.” Aveling’s card. Assuming Aveling was a medical doctor, the pharmacist gave the poison to the maid.

{EU, Gordon Stein; FUK; RAT; RSR; TRI; WSS}